"If you want ideas on how to save money, ask the people who spend it. That’s what President Obama did when he began the SAVE Awards two years ago." That's the opening of Joe Davidson's Washington Post write-up of the SAVE Award, the collaborative process in which all federal employees were invited to submitted their ideas on how to save taxpayer dollars and strwamline government, as well as vote and comment on others'. After a tough-but-fair crack about government acronyms, Trudy Givens gets her due recognition:
Trudy Givens, a Bureau of Prisons employee from Portage, Wis., submitted the winning suggestion. Like many of the other ideas, Givens’s suggestion is so simple, yet so effective, you wonder why [Uncle] Sam didn’t think of it earlier.
Her idea: Send the Federal Register — a daily compendium of government regulations and notices — to federal employees online, rather than by snail mail, with an estimated savings of $16 million through 2015.
As the SAVE Award winner, she got to meet the President and her agency head the Attorney General in the Oval Office — here's a video we put together on that meeting and the process as a whole, give it a watch:
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The Post also talks about the broader context, including quoting Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zients on how projects like the SAVE Award can help change the culture and make everybody more aware of what they can do to uproot the status quo and what they can do better. Along those lines, the reform and reoganization of government, announced by the President in his State of the Union and also being spearheaded by Zients, is using a similar process to get ideas for reform from federal employees on the front lines.
We were also happy to see the Post talk about some of the other finalists:
Fonte: White House